Easy-EIGRP: A Didactic Application for Teaching and Learning of the Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol

In this paper we present Easy-EIGRP, an implementation of the EIGRP (Enhanced Interior Gateway Routing Protocol) protocol developed in Java. Its main goal is to be used as a didactic application in introductory and advanced network courses to support the teaching and learning of EIGRP. Easy-EIGRP has a user-friendly, flexible and robust graphical user interface that allows users to configure all relevant aspects of the network and the EIGRP protocol. It also provides a partial network viewer, an integrated event logger and sniffer, a protocol table viewer, and a graphical viewer of the DUAL (Diffusing Update Algorithm) finite state machine. The initial teaching experiments that we conducted with the usage of Easy-EIGRP indicate that it can dramatically facilitate the learning of EIGRP. Additionally, Easy-EIGRP can be used in a production network as a functional but very limited implementation of the EIGRP protocol.